This week has gone well. The team has made great progress in getting organized. We have had 3 meetings and the last one was particularly well structured thanks our members taking initiative. We mainly went over the content of our project plan. I was responsible for the program structure and I was happy to have received good feedback on that. Everyone did great work so even after carefully going through great section we found little to add or change from what we had which is always a good sign. The diagrams and charts were on point and we concluded the meeting after turning it in.
The next task is to finish the disassembler. Each member will be implementing their version of it. The standup meeting posts revealed that we are all more a less bit rusty when it comes to programming so I think having everyone kind of dive-in in their own way will be very valuable to getting us all in the zone again. Programming is a bit like riding a bike in my experience. There’s a certain muscle memory aspect to it that’s hard to describe since it’s certainly not about the typing. I guess it’s a bit like math exercises in a sense. Anyways, I’m confident that by the next meeting we will all be a little bit more practiced and have a lot of insights to share with each other.
After that I think I will do a deep dive into the i8080’s manual and opcodes. I also plan on taking a good look at how two of my previous personal projects implemented their gameloop algorithms. While an emulator isn’t a game, the a gameloop algorithm made for 60fps will be valuable in implementing a 60hz space invaders emulator. I know that I had iterated on it twice so I look forward to reviewing the differences and taking those learnings into the new emulator as appropriate for the context.
